


Even The Bones

by 8sword



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, Daddy Issues, Episode: s06e19 Mommy Dearest, Episode: s07e13 The Slice Girls, F/F, F/M, M/M, Mommy Issues, Multi, Non Consensual, Purgatory, Sylvia Plath - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-29
Updated: 2013-05-29
Packaged: 2017-12-13 07:17:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/821531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8sword/pseuds/8sword
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I have many names," Eve says, and points at Emma's wrist. "You are wearing one of them."</p><p>Eve grooms Emma to be her successor in Purgatory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Even The Bones

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: A sort of coda to my earlier "Coda for 7.13." You do not have to read that to understand this one. Vague spoilers for S8 regarding Purgatory; mostly jossed because it dispenses with Benny. Italicized passages and title from Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy."
> 
> warnings: body horror, non-con, child abuse, offensive language, gore, sort-of cannibalism. Eve/Emma, Emma/Adam, Eve/Emma/Adam, implied Dean/Alastair. This is a dark M.

_I never could tell where you_

_Put your foot, your root,_

_I never could talk to you._

_The tongue stuck in my jaw._

 

**i.**

 

            Emma is a disappointment from the start. She sits silently in the back seat of the car with the matriarch, twisting around to look back at her house. But Mama's not on the porch anymore, she's already gone back inside, she didn't stay to wave goodbye at Emma.

            Emma feels a gnawing openness inside her, like when she's hungry, except she feels a lot like throwing up. She is afraid, what if she throws up in the ladies' car, what if they yell at her, what if she never sees Mama again?

            "Emma!" says the lady Mama called the Matriarch, the lady Mama said Emma was to listen to in all things. "Look ahead!"

            Emma sinks back into the seat, face burning. "W-will Mama come see me?"

            "I know," says the Matriarch, "that those are not tears I hear in your voice. Are you so weak, Emma?"

            Emma is frightened. She wants her mother. She begins to cry harder. When they arrive at the windowless new place that the Matriarch says will be her home, she is herded into a room in front of four other girls, and she receives ten lashes with a leather rod that Matriarch pulls out of her belt.

            She begins to cry by the fourth one, and Matriarch says, "One lash per tear, Emma," and they do not finish for a very long time.

 

-o-

 

            He gets a text from Krissy before he ditches the phone for one of Frank's new ones. **got into ap bio** , it says with an emoticon he doesn't recognize, hell, could be a smile with teeth, or maybe that's supposed to be a fist pump? Hell if he knows. But hey. Good for you, kid. Like he told Sam, it's a good feeling, to leave someone and feel like they could actually be okay.

            He just wishes--

            Well.

            He wishes, is all.

 

\- o -

 

            "Mama?" she asks. She can't see, but she feels things. They're inside her mouth, filling it as she talks, wriggling into the gap between her teeth and her cheeks, to the back of her tongue. She coughs, gags, tries to retch them out. But they keep coming, falling into her nose, and she thinks it's from her nose, crawling out to her lips but they're coming from the top of her mouth too it's caved in and they're pouring in from her brain squirming in her ears and _somebodyhelpsomebodyhelpme,_ " _Mamaaa_!"

 

\- o -

 

            When Krissy'd said, all sauce and smirk, "Maybe I'll go to Stanford like Sam," Dean hadn't been able to keep from thinking that if he'd helped Emma get away like she'd asked-- _if she hadn't tried to kill you,_ says a Sam voice in his head--he would've taken her to Palo Alto. She was tall like Sam, gawky in that same way he'd gotten at sixteen, and the prim way she'd pulled her suitcase after reminded him of Cas, but her eyes had been all Anna, big and wide and looking for a way out.

            She reminds him of everything but himself, and that's how he knows she didn't deserve to die.

 

\- o -

 

            The screaming becomes sobbing. The sobs become tears. The soft parts that hold her jaw to her face become crumbling rot.

            The crying becomes silence.

 

\- o -

 

            They're driving away with that slinkie shaking on the dashboard like it's dancing, seeing how fast Dean can accelerate without it sliding off onto Sam's knees. Sam's got laughter in his voice, says, "Hey, remember that time you were aiming for Scooby Doo in the claw machine and you got a Care Bear instead?"

            Dean says, "Remember that time you got the clap from a man-witch?"

            Sam doesn't say anything, just scowls, and there's a moment of silence that makes Dean wish he'd just stayed quiet and let Sam do the reminiscing on his own, but then Sam meets his eyes when he glances over, and his mouth goes, all careful, slow-lipped enunciation: "Ballwasher."

            And they're off again, sniggering the same way they did in elementary school whenever anyone said _wiener_ , and it's like driving under a pool of light from a streetlamp, brief on a dark road, there and gone, lighting up the whole car console for the moment it's there, and it's always in those rare moments that Dean's stupid enough to think that everything could be okay.

 

\- o -

 

            "Oh, sweetheart."

            There's light, and sound, and it's been so long that she cringes back into the maggots, tries to burrow into them like blankets. It's been so long and so dark that she's forgotten she was a her, forgotten that she _was_. Hands reach down and find the contours of her elbow and her shoulders and her ribs, defining the lines of her even as they grip. Maggots fall from her like pearls as she's lifted; she splutters them out, feels them roll off her tongue and from between her teeth, and her breaths that follow them are relief and sorrow and terror all wriggling together, hope rushing into her like the painful return of sensation to dead limbs, Mama, Mama, you came for me, and she opens her eyes.

            "Oh, my darling girl," says the thing with the black blood streaming from its mouth and its ears and its empty eye sockets. "I am so sorry."

 

\- o -

 

            When Sam finally tells him Lucifer's back, they get drunk.

            So drunk.

            "Mus' be nice though, huh?" Dean slurs one night that he won't be able to remember, smashed like the windshield of a car that's hit a wall at ninety miles an hour. Says things and watches them spiderweb across the glass, the intricate patterns of all the things he's broken. Sam Sam Cas Sam Emma Cas _Sammy_ \--

            "What...?" Sam's hoarse in that way he gets after he's been talking to Lucifer for hours, after he's downed three hands' worth of fingers, fingers down his throat puke vomit get it out get it _out_ he wonders what Lucifer shoved down Sam's throat in hell wonders if he did what Alastair did doesn't want to know. "Nice to whaaat?"

            "To know there's some son-a-bitch inside'a you, makin' you do the bad stuff."

            A Sam laugh, weak and tired exhalation of breath more than anything. "Yeaaah, not so much." Another laugh, this one more of a sniffle. "Not so much, Dean."

 

\- o -

 

            There's a story Mama read to her before it was Time to Leave. Hansel and Gretel, it was called, and it was about a girl who followed her brother into a witch's house because it was made of candy, and they were almost eaten. It was Hansel's fault, Mama said, stupid of him to go to a house just because it was made of candy, but this is something that men do, they can't master their impulses, they're no better than beasts, Emma. That's why Harmonia chose to give _us_ her power, to worship and honor her.

            Emma thought of Hansel so many times when the Matriarch told her, _Control yourself, Emma._ Felt stupid, like she was that boy Hansel, like she deserved to be eaten the way Mama had said Hansel did. Was always afraid, maybe, that she would be. All the girls knew what happened to the children of their mothers who were born boys. They all knew what they tasted like, had been told it was the taste of weakness. Emma could only remember the sour taste of the milk warmed by the candles burning around them, the way some of the meat had gotten stuck between her back teeth until she pried it free with her tongue.

 

**ii.**

 

            "My dear," says the thing, "I have not come to eat you. I came because I heard you screaming."

            Emma has not screamed in so long. Had not even remembered she existed, while she was in that dark space.

            "You exist," says the thing gently. And it has a bony hand on Emma's cheek, cradling it. And a new eyeball is suddenly growing in one of its sockets, rolling forward with a pop, and it is a familiar eye, hazel and warm. Emma lets out a cry. "I came for you, didn't I?"

            "Mama," Emma whispers. Half in dread, half in want.

            "Emma," the creatures says, and cradles her cheek in a bony hand. Emma stiffens; a maggot falls from her own hair, onto the protruding bones of its hand. It wriggles into the gristle, disappears.

            Emma wants to follow it.

            "I am so glad to have found you," whispers the voice into her hair. It holds her head close, pressed her cheek to the cave of its chest with its uneven rise. "I have been looking for so long, my child." It presses rough lips to Emma's forehead and then something into her hand. Emma looks down and sees it's her necklace, the one Mama wore, the one she gave to Emma when the Matriarch came.

            She looks up. The black socket and Mama's eye are staring back.

            "Will you come with me?" asks Mama's voice. "Will you come with me and let us be together again?"

            Emma knows it's not Mama. Not Mama, not really.

            But it feels so good to be wanted.

            She slips her hand into the woman's and barely flinches when something's tongue flicks out to taste the skin between her fingers.

 

\- o -

 

            Not-Mama limps with a weird, humping walk, like the bones in one of her legs is alternately too short and too long. Things make noises inside her; there are hisses and sighs and clicks and cracks, like things being born inside her ribs.

            "You're right," she says, and her voice isn't Mama's anymore. It's prettier, it's gentler, it brings Emma's head dipping against her shoulder, lamb-like. "I am always laboring, Emma. Always giving that which I am in order to create that which will be. Did your mother do that for you?"

            The answer is no, Emma knows. She turns her face into Not-Mama's drooping breast, inhales the smell of milk and soil there.

            "My children love by hurting." A hand on Emma's face, smoothing down to her throat. "They take and they take from me. But you won't, will you, Emma." A face lowered to hers, the edges of sharp teeth brushed across the corner of her mouth. "You aren't mine."

            She whispers, _not yet._

 

\- o -

 

            Emma wakes in something soft and warm. She notices that first and the wetness later, after she tries to sit up and finds her wrists tied down. Her ankles too. It's intestines, red and wet, wrapped around her ankles and wrists and the knobs of a bed board, splaying her legs and arms open. Not Mama's sitting on the edge of the bed, humming as she watches Emma, but Emma barely notices her; there is something furry _pulsing_ under her, something breathing.

            "Oh God," she says."Oh God oh God."

            "No. I am Eve," says Not Mama, a gentle correction. Then, as Emma's breath breaks on a whimper, it's much more displeased: " _Emma_." For a minute it's the Matriarch's voice, and Emma cringes back into the bed, and the thing under her _screams_ , and there's a fresh gush of warmth under her, seeping into the places left bare and open by the intestines spreading her legs. She whimpers.

            Not Mama draws a cold finger down Emma's finger. "You know how to free yourself." Her touch stops at the tip, just beneath the nail bed where Emma's harder sharper nails are sheathed. "Do it."

            The thing beneath Emma is shuddering. The loops around Emma's wrists and ankles are shaking with it; she thinks they belong to it. She thinks Not Mama slit open the belly of some creature and used its entrails to tie Emma on top of it.

            "No," she whispers.

            Not Mom digs her finger into Emma's nail bed. "A mother has mercy," she whispers into Emma's ear, her hair falling around Emma's face. It smells musty like maggots and wet like pond water. "A queen may not."

            There is sudden ragged pain at Emma's neck, savage and panicked. Whatever she's on top of is trying to rip out her throat to escape.

            As if it could escape, with its insides tied around her.

            Emma squeezes her eyes shut and slams her head backward into the creature's insides. It howls, releasing her neck, and she wrenches her wrists from the headboard in a single movement.

            Gore and hot air sprays across her, drips down the insides of her arms. Then Not Mama's tongue is laving it away, dragging up to her elbow and curling to swallow the gobbets. A new eyeball pops into the socket that had been empty. It's cloudy and white and it looks up at Emma as she starts on the other arm, tongue rough as a cat's. Emma stays very still as the creature lets out a last rattling breath and finishes bleeding out beneath her, around her.

            "Circle of life, Emma," Not Mama whispers as she takes the two ruptured lengths of intestine and wraps them around Emma's waist, tying a bow over Emma's belly button. The ends slap wetly against the inside of her thighs and stick there. Emma begins to cry, silent, dirty. Not Mama traces the tears with her tongue and breathes into Emma's face, "Didn't they ever let you watch The Lion King?"

            Then her mouth closes around the end of one intestine and she begins to suck.

 

\- o -

 

            _I have many names,_ Eve says around the stream of eggs pouring from her mouth. She catches some in her hand, viscous marbles, crushes and smears them across Emma's mouth, her scarred wrist. _You are wearing one of them._

 

\- o -

 

            Eve has a castle in purgatory, a place of damp and moss and gray stones. Sometimes Emma wakes in its caverns, sometimes she wakes other places.

            This time it's the bank of a pond surrounded by willows, their drooping branches swirling with the scum covering the water. Small young creatures dart and splash through it, fanged or finned or feathered, alike only in the way they surround Eve, nuzzle her fingertips for attention, preen under her touch, croon at her smile.

            Emma lies half submerged on the bank, feeling one of the things nibble at the place where her toenail used to be, and thinks about how she never got to be much of a child. It's a resentful thought, one flung angrily across her mind as if in the hope that wherever her mother and father are, living somewhere without her, it will sting them, the pierce of a phantom wasp they'll glance around to try to find.

            But the only one who ever hears her is Eve.

            She turns in the water, her skin gray and gleaming and glorious as dirty water pours from a space between her yellow ribs. She says, "Would you like to?"

            Emma hesitates. Then nods against the sand.

            Like that, it's done: Emma's small like she was for those few hours when Mom rocked her in front of the cradle, sang to her softly in her ear, and Emma remembers, Emma is excited, Emma bangs her little fist in excitement against Eve's rotten shoulder as Eve holds her, screams in delight when Eve tips her backward, backward, backward, Emma, here we gooo!

            Then she flails free, splashing into the water, kicking because she wants to play with the others, the feathers and fins and fangs that are watching her with fascination and a little jealousy because Eve is hers, Eve is _hers_ , her mama, but they hurry away from her out of the water, they flit into hollows in roots where she can't follow them, scamper up into branches, take flight up into the gray sky. Emma stands knee-deep in the water, dripping, as silence and stillness fall around her, and then she turns, she turns and Eve's still there, still watching her, so sad, so sad, and kneeling to open her arms for Emma, and Emma is in them, suddenly, crying, because it hurts, it hurts, Mama, and a mouth is shushing her, arms rocking her, "it hurts, baby, it hurts, doesn't it. Mama's got you, Mama won't let you be alone, Mama's not gonna leave you."

            A mouth in her hair, teeth sharp enough to promise _i'll never let you go._

 

\- o -

 

            She squats beside the shape Eve has traced around the tree. It's all curved lines, no sharp points, not like the sigils the Matriarch had taught them or the ones that had been carved in the doorjamb and window sills of her father's motel room. These are curling and fluid, serpent-like, each line looping back into itself to feed the rest of the symbol. Emma follows them with her eyes and misses what Eve chants, what Eve lets drip from herself to the dark upturned earth.

            Is startled when a white arm shoots out of the dirt.

            Emma scrambles back against Eve's legs, presses her shoulder blades to Eve's knees. Eve laughs. Puts her hand on Emma's neck as the creature emerging from the dirt scrabbles and heaves itself free.

            It is a man. He is naked save the for mud caked across him, and when he is free from the waist up, he crumples, heaving into the soil. Emma rocks forward on the balls of her feet and her hands and her knees, but Eve squeezes her throat to keep her still.

            The man heaves again. A massive serpent spills from his jaw, its front end landing heavily in the dirt. The man retches again, his eyes wide and rolling with terror, white in his dirty face, as the snake hisses and wrenches the rest of itself free. It darts toward Eve and slides along Emma as it slithers up the curve of Eve's knee, up under the folds of her torn dress, its hiss dying abruptly with a sound like a squelch. Eve smiles, and a tiny forked tongue flicks from the corner of her mouth as she crouches.

            Emma mouths at it absently, obediently. She cannot take her eyes from the man.

           

\- o -

 

            "Why'd she take me out?"

            Emma opens her mouth. Watches a slimy thing plop out onto the dirt between her feet. She can only do stillborns so far, not eggs like Eve, not things that issue from her crying or snarling or gnashing their teeth in hunger and fear. She comes out here to hide them in the dirty water, ashamed for Eve to see her failures, but the man has followed her, followed to see her shame, and she whirls, bares her teeth at him in a snarl.

            He snarls back. " _Why'd she take me out_?" He lunges at her, and Emma crashes forward to meet him, digs her thumbs into his throat and screams as his go for her eyes. They tear into each other, blood and dirt and slick, and when Eve surfaces from the river beside them, just her head with her hair floating around her in the dirty water, she eyes the flap of skin hanging from his cheek and the gouges running down Emma's, and she says with a smile from which the brown water runs, "Dear one, this is your uncle Adam."

           

\- o -

 

            Adam talks endlessly. Emma doesn't know what happened to him, just that it was something bad, something that makes him talk like silence is something that will crawl inside his ears and nestle in his brain and breed. His eyes gleam, his hands move; he moves to grip her sometimes, and doesn't even notice when she digs her claws into his skin to pry him off, just brings his bleeding wrist to his face and smears the seeping blood into his mouth as more words clamber out around his skin. He talks about dorm rooms and baseball and mitochondria and his mother, always his mother.

            "The things that killed her came here. Eve brought them here. Killed them for me. Let me watch them die. I want to kill them myself. Eve said she'll bring them back. As many times as I want, I can kill them over and over." His voice getting higher and higher, frantic, like a wolf barking as the crocodile drags it into the water. He digs his jaw into his forearm and gnaws on it as he talks until Eve comes and pulls him away.

            Sometimes he's more lucid. When Emma talks instead of him, when he doesn't have to use his own voice to fill the silence, his eyes can follow her, voracious like a scavenger, cunning like a predator. He likes it best when she talks about Dean and his brother, about how she was supposed to kill them, the different ways she'd been ready to use: a knife to their femoral arteries, to their carotids; single wrenches of their cervical vertebrae; perhaps slamming their nasal bones into their skulls to bisect their brains.

            Other times, neither of them speak. Those are the times when they are with Eve, when she sits on her throne with her knees splayed wide as she holds court, as vampires beg her indulgence for a bit of blood, All-Mother, please; as shifters feed their own shedding skin reverently into her open mouth; as Adam mouths the curves of her legs, buries his face against her, inside her.

            As Emma stands at Eve's shoulder and watches.

 

\- o -

 

            "You ever met an angel?"

            Emma is raw, too raw from Eve's smile and the teeth inside it, long crocotta teeth that clung when they sank in, speared and tore, tore pieces of Emma free. _Isn't that a funny phrase, Emma?_ as the blood ran down Eve's chin between Emma's knees. **_Tearing_** _free. Like your own skin wanted to escape you all along!_ Eve's low hysterical laughter is still in her ears, like it seeped into the fluid behind the membranes, her laughter and the way she'd borne down on Adam, the squelching, the noises Adam makes to chase away the silence, loud and low and frantic.

            "Did you? Did you? They're vessels, you know. Dean and Sam those fuckers those _fuckers_ \--"

            Emma sinks onto her knees in the mud and retches forth another body. This one twitches as it lands in the water, convulses and darts away with a single thrash of its tail. Emma vomits.

            "Hey," Adam says. "Hey," and thumps her on the back, then rubs, then thumps again, like he can't figure out which one to do. By the end he's digging his ragged fingernails under her shoulder blades like they're egg shells he can peel off and she reaches under the water and bends his foot back, bends until the ankle snaps.

            "Ow," he breathes, and folds over her. His belly around her head, his face in her armpit. They stay like that for a moment, quiet except for the slow thuds of their heartbeats, and he jams his head in harder, grinds his ear against her ribs, gasps out, "She must have brought us here for something." Another rattled breath, a movement of his head that means he's gnawing again. Garbled around his own flesh: "She _must_ have."

            But Eve doesn't _must_ anything. They both know that.

            Emma retches out another body. This one sinks its teeth into her leg instead of swimming away and she is too tired to care. Adam's the one who smashes its skull, who turns it to pulp, unclenches the dead jaw from around her leg and drags her back to Eve's chambers.

 

\- o -

 

_I was ten when they buried you_

_At twenty I tried to die_

_And get back, back, back to you._

\- o -

 

            "He thinks someone is coming for him," Eve says one night. She smoothes her whole, smooth hand down Adam's hair where his face is buried between her legs and draws Emma down to her own mouth. "Isn't that sweet, Emma? Isn't that adorable?"

            Emma tries not to bite Eve's tongue as she rides her fingers. Eve likes when Emma bites, but the venom she bleeds is sticky, adheres Emma to whatever her mouth opens to until she only breathe through her nose, fast and panicked. When Eve rides her face it's too scary, the smother, the suffocation. It's too much like being in that place, like not being.

            "Emma thought someone would come for her too," Eve says, and crooks her fingers higher, hard. Emma's breath breaks. Eve smiles, slow, pulls her in for a kiss. "And I did, didn't I."

\- o -

 

_"My mom," Adam said once, his face in Emma's hair. "She used to--"_

 

\- o -

 

            "I would kill you if I could," she whispers to him. Eve has fallen asleep, arachne legs twitching spasmodically as she dreams, and Emma and Adam are left suspended in the congealing silk she wove around them so that only their wettest parts were exposed. Emma's blood is all in her head; upside down, she's blinking against the pressure of it as she sways with the silk when Eve's legs twitch, as the movement brushes her against the exposed parts of Adam.

            "Y-yeah?" he moans.

            "Yeah," she whispers, clenching to hold onto him, to keep from swaying back down into that bobbing empty space where her limbs are spread taut.

            She's not sure if it's kindness or hatred that makes her want to kill him, a wish to free him or to be free _of_ him, just knows that when she whispers it they're both shuddering, slick and rigid. Because she's messed them up, Eve's messed them up, made things that should be wrong feel good, like the way she gives birth in the wrong places, a life from a mouth, pleasure through an eye socket, through a gaping wound in the gut, ecstasy as flesh rubs against raw insides. It's wrong it's wrong it's _wrong_ and Adam shouts when he comes.

 

\- o -

 

            When Adam's bloodlust is too much, when he's gnawed one of his fingers off, or his arms, Eve sends them into the crunching leaves of the forest. They bound after the rustle of prey, leap and dart through the trees and rocks with knives and crossbows, running as things run from them. In Eve's castle Emma is prey but outside it she is predator, outside it nothing tears into her unless she tears into it first.

            Unless she wants it to.

            The djinni collect around her, ghost-like, drawn by the fragrance of blood. The first bite hurts, the second, a voice whispering _you'll like this, All-Daughter, we'll take care of you._ After that it's only white-hot flashes behind her eyes, everything collapsing together as they lay her out on the leaves and take their fill.

            Distantly she hears Adam returning, hears the crunch of bones and spray of soft things against the ground. Even more distantly she feels the tug of dead things being pulled from her skin. "Emma," Adam saying, "Emmaemma _emma._ " Mauling her mouth with his, hot and bloody, trying to share with her what he has found.

            She has time to feel the hot liquid running down his face, too serous to be blood, before the venom burns that away too.

\- o -

 

_I thought even the bones would do._

 

-o -

 

            In Grandma's kitchen, pinching pie crust with her fingers. Soft laughter and a charm bracelet tinkling around a shrunken wrist.

            "Am I doing it right, Grandma Mary?"

            "Let's try it and see." Gnarled fingers tugging a bit of the dough free, splitting it so they can both taste. A familiar face smiling. "Mmm! Tastes like an angel must've made it!"

            "Grandmaaa! _I_ made it!"

            "Then you must be an angel!"

            Laughing, and lifting her arms to be picked up and held against Grandma's floury apron.

                       

\- o -

 

            In the backseat of a car, listening to her parents argue over where to go for dinner.

            "We had burgers last night, Dean."

            "Emma likes them, Lyd!"

            "Emma's barely got teeth yet and that waiter last night was two minutes away from calling child protective serves on you for feeding it to her!"

            Dad's big hand reaching back and closing around Emma's foot, shaking it affectionately. "Eh, she's a tough kiddo. Aren't you, Emma? Aren't you?"

            Giggling, and reaching to pat Dad's hand with her own.

 

\- o -

 

            In the middle of a bed, looking down at a dark-haired man below her. Grinding her hips and watching his eyes squeeze shut, his hands dig into her waist. The hot rush of power, the knowledge that three days from now the man beneath her will be dead.

            Smiling, and leaning down to kiss him.

 

\- o -

 

            In a crib, watching Mama and the man who came to see her. The man picks Emma up, and his hands go still and crushing, his eyes wide and scared, as he stares at her.

            "You..."

            His hands going gentle, suddenly, and clutching her to him. The sounds of an argument with Mama that he keeps Emma safe from, his hands cupped over her ears. She chews on his sleeve and breathes his familiar scent, his smell that smells like Emma. His hand drops from her ear to hold her closer, and she hears, " _Lydia_. Just come with me. I can keep you safe."

            "I don't know that," Mama's voice whispers. She sounds scared, doesn't sound like an Amazon. "You're a hunter, you might kill us both."

            Dad holding Emma closer. "I wouldn't do that." His heart pounding next to Emma's ear. "I'd never do that."

            Closing her eyes, and believing him.

           

\- o -

 

            In a parking lot, clutching Dad and Papa's hands. Chanting, "One, two, _three!_ " and bursting into laughter as they swing her over the big sewer grate in the parking lot. Dad's saying, "Any teenage mutant ninja angels living down there, Cas?" and the man Emma calls Papa's replying, "I still don't know what that means, Dean," and Emma's letting go of their hands to run back to the grate and peer in for mutant ninjas, and--oops. "Dad?"

            "What, Em?"

            "I lost my shoe."

 

\- o -

 

            In her father's car, gone from the motel room before her uncle can get there. Hitting the interstate at ninety mph, and Emma tells Dean he can drop her off at the first truck stop they find, she'll find her way from there. But he passes one, then another, as the sky begins to lighten to gray and then orange.   

            They pull into a diner parking lot and he gets out without saying anything. Emma thinks maybe this is his version of a _time for you to get out_ , so she pulls her roll-away out of the foot well where she's kept it crammed against her numb legs the whole time and starts off across the pebbled asphalt toward the bus station she sees across the street. There's thirty-six dollars in her pocket she swiped from the table in the motel room when her father wasn't looking, and she's not going to look back at him because, _let's not...go there, okay?_

            "Hey!" The shout's not that loud, but she's not that far yet. She stops, unwilling, turns around. He's looking at her, has his hands shoved in his pockets.

            "C'mon," he says, and he's not looking at her now, is looking at the road over her shoulder. "Lemme buy you breakfast."

            She hears _at least_ at the end of his words. She doesn't really want to stay, to satisfy his guilt, but her feet carry her inside, following him through the tables, to the booth where the hostess seats them. He asks for coffee and bacon and eggs and looks at her expectantly. She doesn't order anything, _just water, please_ , doesn't want to owe him anything more than she already does (her _life_ ), waits until he rubs a hand down his face and says _I'm gonna hit the john_ , and then while he's gone she leaves, rolling her bag through the diner tables and out the door.

           

\- o -

 

            In her father's car, gone from the motel room before her uncle can get there. Hitting the interstate at ninety mph, and Emma tells her father he can drop her off at the first truck stop they find, she'll find her way from there. But he passes one, then another, as the sky begins to lighten to gray and then orange.        

            They drive all the way to California, and at one of the diners along the way, Emma learns her dad likes syrup on his bacon just like she does.

 

\- o -

_But they pulled me out of the sack,_

_And--_

 

\- o -

 

            Adam's teeth drag her out of it. Gasping, crying. They rock together for a moment, bloody-mouthed, wet faces, breathing in each other's spit and sobs, fingers clenched and digging.

            "My mom," he gasps, shuddering, "my _mom_."

            Emma digs her thumbs into his throat and does not kill him.

 

\- o -

           

            Eve knows what they did. What they saw.

            Tastes the venom in their blood, maybe; smells the dreams on them when she takes them into her mouth. It makes her smile, patient and vengeful, and dig her fingers deeper. She feeds them things, mushrooms and reductions and powders, and half the time Emma does not know where she is, what she is, just bodies moving around her, inside her, the sound of a snake hissing softly and the sinuous sensation of being too full. She dreams of her mother and her father, of being loved, of being shot, of that time in the darkness.

            "Emma." A voice into her hair. Hands pulling her by the ankles. "Emma."

            Adam. He drags her through gray and darkness, outside into crackling leaves. He crouches, swipes his tongue across her face once. Smells of rotting meat; it cuts away some of the perfume, and Emma tries to roll onto her side.

            "I smell them. I smell them, Emma. Come on. Come on!"

            A crossbow in her hand. The wood rough, and Emma turns over, retches in one violent, wet gush. Plunges the bow's bolt into the body before it can begin to thrash and tears a gobbet free. Begins to eat.

            Adam waits as she feeds. His eyes are feverish. "I smell them, Emma. I smell them," he whispers.

            Emma smears her mouth across his to catch the scent from his nose. Then he's tearing away into the trees, Emma snarling after him because this is _her_ hunt, and they crash and tumble together through the forest to the place from which Eve has forbidden them, the place where the last of the Leviathan are bound. Black pits of hunger and hate steaming in the ground, consuming whatever comes close enough to be trapped in their tar. Stench carries strong from the place where they are, behind the thickest, darkest trees, Emma and Adam slowing as they smell it.

            There is squelching and heavy breathing, the sound of eating and being eaten. Someone crying out. Emma inhales.

            Adam's nostrils are flared, his eyes incandescent. He drags his bared wrist bone back and forth across his teeth, tiny clicks as it bounces over the ridges of the enamel. "Emma," he breathes: a whine, a sigh.

            She shoves him back and bares her teeth. He subsides, crawling close to the ground on his belly next to her as they push through the last of the trees. His flanks pant hard and fast against her leg, sharp ribs against her knees.

            There is a man in one of the pits. He is shoulder-deep and sinking, blood already spilling out of his mouth as the Leviathan mire eats his insides. It is Dean Winchester, plastered with the black goo, and he is still reaching for the tar-covered man at the edge of the pit who is holding a branch out to him as the pit hisses spatters  of black across the hem of his coat, bubbles toward his feet.

            Both their eyes flick to her and Adam. Recognition flashes across Dean's black face, inside his light eyes, dread and panic. "What the--" he chokes out. Chokes on blood.

            The branch hits him in the shoulder almost frantically. Emma fits the bolt to her crossbow and watches it streak through the air and punch through the man trying to pull him from the pit.

            The body topples into the muck. The splash it sends up sloshes over Dean's mouth before his shout can get out; there's only his rolling white eyes in his black face, the muffled sound of his scream.

            Then the goo is closing over him, sucking both bodies in with a slurping sound, a final thrash as his arm flails above the goo. A final vicious burble as the black surface closes over his fingertips and goes still, smooth.

            Like he was never there at all.

            There's silence. Nothing but the roar of Emma's blood in her ears. The heart galloping in her chest. Something sighing and clicking inside her ribs. She crouches and braces her arms to let it free.

            Behind her, Adam begins to laugh.

           

           

\- o -

_\--they stuck me together with glue._

_And then I knew what to do._

_I made a model of you,_

_A man in black with a Meinkampf look_

_And a love of the rack and the screw._

_And I said I do, I do._

 

 

 


End file.
